WHEN CLIMATE CHANGE
AND FISH COLLIDE
BY TOM ZELLER, JR.
PREVIOUS PAGE: DOUG ALLAN/ GETTY IMAGES
With a limberness that defies his 69 years, Frank
Mirarchi heaves himself over the edge of a concrete wharf
and steps out onto a slack, downward sloping dock line
bouncing 20 feet above the lapping waters near Scituate,
Mass. He shimmies laterally along the pylons, steadying
himself with a grip on some steel rigging, until he reaches
the roof of the pilot house on his boat, a groundfish trawler
called the Barbara L. Peters, after his mother-in-law.
He descends to the motor room and
rubs a hand along a clean stretch of engine piping. “I’ll be done painting in here
soon,” says Mirarchi, who has been harvesting cod, flounder and other quarry
from the Gulf of Maine and, further out,
from the lucrative shallows of Georges
Bank for the better part of five decades.
“Then I’ll move outside.”
Painting is about all the action Mirarchi’s boat has seen lately. Facing massive
cuts in government-proscribed limits
to the groundfish species at the very
heart of New England’s commercial fishing economy, the Barbara L. Peters —
like the 30 or so other nominally active
boats remaining in this New England
sector, and dozens more boats up and
down the Northeast coast — has been
locked hard against its pier, rising and
falling with the tides but going nowhere.
“We’re gonna lose a bunch of boats,”
Mirarchi says, referring to the high
odds that some fishermen, perhaps even
himself, will be forced to abandon the
livelihood that has sustained them for
decades. Mirarchi barely broke even last